Do You Believe in Santa Claus? Read Carefully.

Tim Chaffey, AiG–U.S., responds to a reader who compared our belief in the accuracy and authority of the Bible to believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

I've never seen such retards flocked together. Read genesis with an objective mentality and you might get ahead. Can you explain how god creates 2 lights(moon isnt a light). Let me guess he didnt actually mean light producing, he meants light reflecting (nice one). So it took 1 day to create the heans and the earth and another day for the sun and moon?

HE must've been quite busy with the trillions of over suns all over our galaxy and the other milky way. I'm suprised no mention of any of that.

Seems like this god written book feels like its been written by an ignorant farmer from the middle-east. I have never seen something so complex being explained so simply.

Now about Noah's ark, every creature male and female on one boat? quite the boat seperating polar bears in refigerators and the lions in hotter climates not to mention the million species of insects. Must be a big boat? unfortunately for you the bible stupidly stated the size of the boat. 300 cubits by 50 by 30. Thats 150m x 25m x 15m. a bit small no? i guess not but you state in this **@ website that dinosaurs were on the boat aswell. So im gussing you got to seperate the predators that may kill each other or does god take care of that? How about food supply or god taken care of that? i guess he could do that right?

Genesis 7

The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. Explain this please? 15 cubits, so 7.5 metres of water covered the highest seas?
i know you like to believe in god but please do not invest in "wishful thinking bias", even someone like yourself must be strong enough to not believe in santa claus and the tooth fairy.

I've never seen such retards flocked together.

Greetings. If you want to engage in a serious discussion, then you should at least try to refrain from using logical fallacies. This one is a type of ad hominem attack known as a question-begging epithet. Nevertheless, the intelligence of our researchers and writers (or lack thereof) has no bearing on whether we are right or wrong.

Read genesis with an objective mentality and you might get ahead.

It would be great to interpret Genesis objectively. The trouble is that we all have a bias, so any interpretation of the passage will contain some degree of subjectivity. Our desire is to be as objective as possible when reading the text so that we can determine what it actually states. The truth is that an objective reading of Genesis 1 will never yield the idea that God used millions or billions of years to create everything. That can only be done when one imports foreign concepts into the text, which is subjective.

Can you explain how god creates 2 lights(moon isnt a light). Let me guess he didnt actually mean light producing, he meants light reflecting (nice one). So it took 1 day to create the heans and the earth and another day for the sun and moon?

You guessed it. A quick glance at the account of Day Four (Genesis 1:14–19) would have answered this for you. This passage tells us that two of the reasons God created the sun and moon were to provide light on the earth and to rule over the day and night. It’s quite obvious they fulfill those duties rather well. The word translated as “give light” is from the Hebrew אוֹר (‘owr), and it means to give light, to shine, or to light up. Since the moon was made to give light on the earth during the night, it is perfectly appropriate to call it a light. Besides, the biblical writer used the language of appearance rather than modern technical usage. If you would like to nitpick the Bible on this point, then you’d better call your local meteorologist and complain the next time he or she talks about the sunrise or sunset.

God could have taken any amount of time He wanted to create everything, but He chose to do it all in six days. This is the basis of our workweek. The next time you take a day off from work, you should remember to thank God for giving us a day of rest.

HE must've been quite busy with the trillions of over suns all over our galaxy and the other milky way. I'm suprised no mention of any of that.

Genesis 4:16 states, “Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day [the sun], and the lesser light to rule the night [the moon]. He made the stars also” (emphasis added). Making a huge universe is no more difficult to God than making a blade of grass because He is infinite in wisdom and power.

By the way, where’s the other Milky Way galaxy?

Seems like this god written book feels like its been written by an ignorant farmer from the middle-east. I have never seen something so complex being explained so simply.

First, Moses put it together, and He was schooled in Egypt, which is in Africa, not the Middle East. He was raised by royalty and trained in the “wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:21–22). He later spent time tending the flocks of his father-in-law when he fled Egypt. Second, if the Bible is so simple, why haven’t you grasped some of its most basic concepts?

Perhaps the reason it is explained in “simple” terms is so that people can understand it. God’s Word was not composed for only the intellectual elite. A child can understand its basic message, but even the greatest scholars will never plumb its depths this side of eternity.

Now about Noah's ark, every creature male and female on one boat? quite the boat seperating polar bears in refigerators and the lions in hotter climates not to mention the million species of insects.

If you read Genesis 6–7 carefully, you would see how your objection fails. The Bible doesn’t say Noah brought every creature, but a pair of every kind, and seven of some kinds (Genesis 6:20; 7:2–3). So Noah didn’t need to bring two brachiosaurs, two diplodocuses, two apatosauruses, and two argentinosauruses. He just needed to take two sauropods on the Ark. He didn’t need two polar bears, two brown bears, two black bears, and two grizzlies. He just needed to bring two bears. Since the Flood, the bears have spread out and “speciated” into the variety we see today. The fact that the various bears can, in many cases, still interbreed is consistent with the biblical account.

Also, the insects may not have been on the Ark, even though there would have been plenty of room for them. The “creeping things” that were on board the Ark may have included insects, but the Hebrew term רֶמֶשׂ (remes) often refers to reptiles.1 Further, the Bible specifies that all of the living things “in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life … on the dry land” died (Genesis 7:22). Since insects do not breathe through nostrils but in other ways such as through spiracles, they may not have been included on the Ark’s manifest. Although many insects probably did make it on to the Ark, insect eggs could have survived the Flood on floating mats or other debris.

Must be a big boat? unfortunately for you the bible stupidly stated the size of the boat. 300 cubits by 50 by 30. Thats 150m x 25m x 15m. a bit small no? i guess not but you state in this **@ website that dinosaurs were on the boat aswell. So im gussing you got to seperate the predators that may kill each other or does god take care of that? How about food supply or god taken care of that? i guess he could do that right?

It was an extremely large vessel, as the full-scale ark featured in the upcoming Ark Encounter theme park will vividly demonstrate. We have numerous articles on our website that you could read that would have answered each of your objections. Here are two articles that deal with most of your questions.

Noah was specifically commanded to take the necessary food on the Ark. “And you shall take for yourself of all food that is eaten, and you shall gather it to yourself; and it shall be food for you and for them” (Genesis 6:21).

If you took the time to study this subject, you would find that the dimensions are quite remarkable. One engineering study found the Ark was well balanced between strength, stability, and comfort.2 It is no wonder many ocean going vessels today mimic these dimensional ratios.

Genesis 7

The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. Explain this please? 15 cubits, so 7.5 metres of water covered the highest seas?

This means that the water level was 15 cubits above the highest hill or mountain at that time, and this would have been prior to the Ark landing in the mountains of Ararat on Day 150 of the Flood. The world today is much different than the pre-Flood world or the world during the Flood. The high mountain ranges we observe today were one of the results of the Flood.

The pre-Flood world probably did not have extremely high mountains like we have today.

Originally, there was probably just one continent (Genesis 1:9 states that God gathered all the water together in one place, so the land may well have been in one place). The Hebrew word translated as “mountains” is הָרִים (harim), and it can refer to mountains or hills. Since God created the earth to be inhabited, the pre-Flood world probably did not have extremely high mountains like we have today. So the water did not need to rise as high as Mt. Everest, which didn’t exist yet. Instead, we should look to God’s accurate record of the past in Scripture to learn what the world was like prior to the Flood.

Also, if we were able to smooth out the earth’s surface (and ocean basins), there would be enough water to cover the whole earth to a depth of more than one and a half miles. So if the pre-Flood world was vastly different, as implied by Scripture, then there’s no difficulty in believing the water covered the highest hills to a depth of 15 cubits—as it could potentially have been much more.

Why mock the idea of a worldwide Flood on a planet with an abundance of water like many secularists already have? The ironic thing is that many secular scientists have proposed a flood of biblical proportions on Mars to explain many of the geologic features on that planet. As far as we know, Mars has no liquid water on its surface.

i know you like to believe in god but please do not invest in "wishful thinking bias",

If the biblical God does not exist, then why would anything matter? Why did you waste so much time writing an email if you were just a chemical reaction? Why would it be “wrong” for us to “invest in wishful thinking”? In fact, how would you define right and wrong, good or evil, etc.?

If atheism were true, then there would be no such thing as good and evil or better and worse. So why would your view that God doesn’t exist be better than my view that He does if there is no ultimate standard to measure something as good or bad?

Let’s compare ideas here. I believe an all-powerful, all-knowing God created a perfect world, and man’s sin corrupted the creation. God is the basis for laws of logic, morality, and natural laws, and upholds this world by His power. In the Bible, He has revealed to man things that will come to pass long before they ever occur, demonstrating His existence and supernaturalism.

Atheists must believe that everything we observe came about from random processes (i.e., materialism or philosophical naturalism). Otherwise, if an immaterial, spiritual realm existed, God could be there, and at best the skeptic could only appeal to agnosticism. So, in your worldview, order came from disorder in an absolutely closed system (i.e., the universe), intelligence from non-intelligence, information from non-information, life from non-life, etc. That is wishful thinking.

even someone like yourself must be strong enough to not believe in santa claus and the tooth fairy.

I don’t believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or evolutionary missing links, and I don’t know of any of my colleagues here at Answers in Genesis who do. I do believe that Nikolaos of Myra existed. Most know his name as Saint Nicholas. His generosity, rooted in his Christian faith, may have led to some of the folklore of Santa Claus.

In some small ways, Nikolaos reflected the generosity of the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave His life on the Cross, suffering the penalty we deserve while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). Those who turn from their sins and place their faith in Christ will be forgiven of their sins and saved from the wrath of the righteous and holy Creator (Romans 5:9). They will dwell with God and enjoy His goodness for eternity (John 14:2–3; Revelation 21:3–4). Those who reject Him will suffer forever in the lake of fire (Revelation 20:15).

What about you? Will you continue to mock the God who gives you life and breath, or will you call on Him to save you from your sin? There is an inescapable reality: one day, you will proclaim, “Jesus is Lord.” The question is: will you do it now willingly or will you wait until you are forced to do it at your judgment? Then it will be too late for you to be saved.

[Jesus Christ] humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:8–11)

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Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively. We focus on providing answers to questions about the Bible—particularly the book of Genesis—regarding key issues such as creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth.